Rain

It’s been raining, hard, for several days now. In some areas of Ontario, and in neighbouring Quebec, flooding has become a serious issue. My own issue is minor: I can’t write.

I can’t write – or more specifically, I can’t build plot and setting and action – because I can’t go walking. Walking is when my brain makes lateral connections, seeing relationships, making jumps of understanding. Treadmill walking doesn’t work: I’ve tried, but I need, it seems, to be outside, letting the wind and birdsong and all the other distractions of nature occupy enough of my active brain to let the ruminations occur behind the scenes, as it were, until something pops out. Once the understanding is there, I can put words to paper regardless of weather – but the understanding needs the walking.

I’ve got enough to occupy me, with the continuing copy-editing and formatting of Empire’s Hostage in preparation for publication, but Book III is bubbling somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, and it wants out. It wants me to wander for hours along trails (which are currently mires of mud), looking for warblers, listening for catbirds, while synapses connect bits of ideas and previous knowledge and pure imagination to begin the next stages of Lena’s journey. The rain is due to stop tomorrow: a huge relief for those affected by flooding, and a different relief for me.